


Seven Days

by Jintian



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-12-28
Updated: 1999-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-29 20:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/323820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jintian/pseuds/Jintian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Takes place between November 21-27 of 1999, post-"Amor Fati."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Days

**Author's Note:**

> Written before "Sein und Zeit."
> 
> Beta thanks to Forte.

  
Passing DC on Sunday in the pale light of dawn he samples a few radio stations, wondering with a sad bewilderment what has happened to the familiar sounds of his youth. Those cool electronic synthesizers, boy bands with equally cool voices. They have all been replaced by loud, arrogant guitars and cheesy commercial spots, too-bright noise making the backs of his eyes pinch with hurt.

He listens for half a moment to the southern twang of a man reading the book of Matthew, then turns the radio off. The only sound for some time is the freeway humming against the tires. The road is spotted lightly with other cars, and the rising sun washes over them with a tinge of pink, warm on the last edges of the night.

His cell phone rings when the hands of his watch settle at three after seven, but the outdated clock on his dashboard says it is already eight. He purses his lips at the numbers as he thumbs the power button on his phone. "Mulder."

Scully's voice is a breath of autumn air. Smooth, blue, clean. "I'm lying here reading your note. I thought you weren't leaving until _after_ breakfast."

"I know, I'm sorry. I wanted to get a jump on the traffic."

"Where are you now?"

"Just past the city. I didn't want to wake you."

"I wouldn't have minded," she says, and the inflection of her words is a rare sound, wistful and soft.

He imagines her beneath his sheets, naked body following the same cool line of her voice. Hair bright against the pillow, cheek pressed into the cotton as she holds the phone to one ear.

"Are you angry?" he asks.

She sighs. "No, of course not."

He lets that sink in, the tone of her words. Unsurprised, resigned.

"So then you'll be at your mother's by lunchtime," she continues.

He mutters a sound of agreement, but something in his voice catches her.

"You sound as if you're not going to like it there."

He hesitates, and then instead of answering directly makes a roundabout move. "Scully, God made the world in seven days, right?"

"According to Genesis, He rested on the seventh."

"So I can survive at least that long in Connecticut. Right?"

"Mulder, I'm sure you'll be _fine_."

"Isn't that _your_ line?" he counters.

She snorts. Sighs again. "Maybe if you tell me what bothers you so much about visiting her.... Won't this be the first time you've seen each other since you were in the hospital?"

"Yes. But Scully, nothing bothers --" He stops. "Fine. Something bothers me. But I want to see how it goes before I say anything."

"I want to know how it goes, too, whatever it is," she says.

"I _will_ tell you. Soon."

"Call me tonight then. I'll be at home."

"Of course," he answers, softening his voice.

A click of silence as she hangs up. He thumbs the phone off, placing it on the passenger seat.

After a few minutes he turns the radio back on, flips through until finally he finds a ballad in guitar and mournful croon on some soft rock station.

Drives on into the morning.

*

Just before reaching Greenwich he stops at a grocery store and buys a poinsettia. Red foil wrapped around a pot the  
circumference of his two hands. Possibly inappropriate for his mother's lapsed-Jew, lapsed-converted-Christian status, but it would add a brief blaze of color to the whiteness of her house. Something to relieve the sterility.

He parks at the curb, holding the poinsettia in the crook of an elbow as he shoulders his suitcase, garment bag, and laptop from the trunk. Locks the car, turns, and sees his mother waiting for him on the porch. Cane in one hand, and even from across the yard he can see the tension in her knuckles.

"Fox," she says, as he mounts the steps, and he sets down the luggage to enfold her in a one-armed embrace, still holding the poinsettia.

Her breath in his ear trembles, and her hair smells of lavender. Thin, pale scent of memory.

*

His mother dislikes overusing utilities such as heating, and her house is cold, the chill breathing up and down his arms,  
goosebumps forming as he looks around the delicate upper middle class interior.

She assures him that the cane is a recent addition, prescribed more for the arthritis in her knees than any lingering effect of her stroke. That she only needs it for especially cold days, or rainy ones. He glances out the picture window at the wintry afternoon sky and urges her to sit, wait while he takes his things upstairs.

The room has not remained the same over the years, of course, as he has gone through cycles of visiting frequency. But the basics are the same: the bookshelf with its eclectic collection of childhood tomes, the basketball trophies, various scholastic awards. A framed portrait of himself and Samantha on the nightstand.

He picks up the photo, settling himself on the bed -- same familiar quilted comforter -- and as always his eyes are drawn not to himself but to his sister.

Her hair is uncharacteristically down and soft around the dark navy blue of her shoulders. In his mind's eye is the adult version, previously seen only in pales and browns until the smoking man took him from the hospital. That flowered dress. Her face shining towards him as she straightens from playing with her children.

He blinks now, and the scene disappears. Dream memory. Lost in  
the same wash of sea that now only on occasion throws the images  
of his hospital time back up to the surface.

He sets the frame back on the nightstand, tracing the brown of her hair with his thumb.

*

"Taste this, Mom." He holds out the spoon to her, watching the subtle changes of her face as she reacts to the flavor.

"Good," she says with a nod. "Very good, actually. Where did you learn how to make soup like that?"

He hesitates, glancing into the simmering pot. Decides to plunge ahead anyway. "My partner taught me the recipe. Although she does a much better job with it than I do. It's been in her family for years."

He waits, already forming the words to explain, to describe the events of his life since he saw her last, but she simply says, "Well, I'm glad you're learning some domestic skills finally. I've never believed it was only women's work."

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches her slice vegetables on the cutting board, her movements sure and quick. No remnants of the stroke there. "Well," he says, "I'm not learning them only now. I mean, living alone you have to pick up some things."

"True," she agrees. "Although among my friends, it seems like their children were constantly coming back for a home-cooked meal or free laundry." She pauses the knife in the green pile of lettuce. "But I suppose you lived a bit far away for that."

Some bubbles rise to the surface of the soup. He stirs the pot with a gentle swirl of the spoon, making them disappear. Thinking of past visits to Greenwich, always on a quest for knowledge of some sort, of some relationship or name. Thinking that now is no different, only he has brought her a poinsettia to start, rather than an accusation.

She speaks again, her face turned towards him in the late afternoon light of the kitchen. "You're here now, at least. I want you to know how tremendously grateful I am for that."

He meets her gaze, seeing in her eyes the conviction of her words. But thinking behind his projected half-smile of happiness, of filial love: _Grateful? To who, Mom? Grateful to who?_

*

Scully answers in the middle of the second ring, her voice dipping into the smooth velvet softness of "Hello?" and tracing a shiver across his back.

"Today is Samantha's birthday," he tells her.

She does not miss a step. "Oh, Mulder, I hadn't realized. I'm sorry."

"We didn't even mention that. Neither of us."

Gentle, stepping on stones across a river. She knows which _we_ he means. "Were you planning to?"

He sighs, closing his eyes to the room, rubbing the bridge of his nose with two fingers, his mother somewhere downstairs doing whatever is in her night routine. "No, no. I wasn't." And then, "She'd be...she _is_...thirty-four."

"I know," Scully says.

He remembers the burn of tears in his eyes one night, waking from a dream of Samantha and the children. Pressing his head into Scully's naked shoulder, sobbing, "She was so happy with them, Scully, she was so happy...." He remembers her cool hand at the nape of his neck, pulling him closer even though he must have been crushing her already.

He shakes his head against the phone. She must have had the thought at least once, that night, of her own lost happiness with children. Of Emily. But she had murmured only, "Shhh...shhh. It's all right. Mulder, it's all right."

He opens his eyes, picks up the framed photo from the nightstand. "Scully, she keeps so many pictures around the house. I hardly noticed before. Pictures of Samantha, Dad, me and her all together. Like we were this happy family."

"And it bothers you."

His voice is quiet now, almost hoarse. "Of course it does. It's like looking at this world that might as well not have existed at all."

"But it did. You remember it. You've talked to me about things before, playing baseball with Samantha on the Vineyard."

It would be so easy to say the words on the tip of his tongue, to explain it so she could understand. _My mother was unfaithful to my father. I might not be my father's son._

But for now he prefers to go with her misdirection. "Playing baseball with your sister isn't the same as playing baseball with your father. And sometimes those memories do seem real, Scully. But then sometimes, it's like they happened to another person. One night, she was gone, and the kid I was before then went with her."

Scully is silent, and from years of knowing and experience he can sense the movement of her thoughts, even on the phone line, the radiation toward him of that familiar brilliant energy. "You were going to stay seven days. It's her birthday today, the 21st. And on the 27th...you planned to leave then?"

"I'm not sure. Do you think I should stay a while after that?"

The energy flares at him over the connection. "Do _you_ think you should?"

He sighs, blinking up at the ceiling. "I don't know." Unspeaking for a few beats, listening to her breathe. "I'll call you if something happens."

"Mulder, I want to talk about this."

"Scully." He squeezes his eyes shut, opens them again. "I just can't. Not yet."

She takes a breath. "Call me tomorrow night then."

"We'll see."

"Mulder, I mean it."

"Scully, I'll call you if something happens."

He clicks the phone off, lying back on the bed. The quiet of the room encloses him in the shell of his own breathing. The lack of noise and activity is a heavy blanket, suffocating and oppressive. This, more than anything, is what he has been dreading for the seven days of his visit. The silence.

Easier to curl up on his side and surrender like a child than to try and break it. He closes his eyes, memory flipping through the countless lonely nights he has spent in this small space. His mother's house, in its cool and white aloofness, is beyond his power to defeat. The long, sad history of those nights alone is enough to overcome him. The only defense, as always, is within his own mind.

And he thinks of Scully, surrounded by the warm honey light of her apartment, the smooth flush colors of her mouth smiling at him. He pictures his hand caressing her cheek, the line of her jaw, her head tilted back and eyes heavy-lidded with desire. Her hair catching tints of gold in the red, brushing against his fingers like a tender flame.

*

He rakes his mother's yard. With gloved fingers he picks dead leaves from her rosebushes. He goes with her to an afternoon play, to her dentist, to buy groceries. On a warm day he repaints her mailbox and tries to find out why her car is making noises. He reads her magazines on interior decoration and gardening. He attempts to learn German from a phrasebook. He goes running in the crisp air of every morning.

He does not confront his mother with questions, though he watches her each day with a careful eye.

He does not call Scully.

*

Why do you always do this? Why do you never answer me?

She does not blink, eyes dark and unfathomable. "Fox, this is Thanksgiving dinner."

"And?"

Her voice is dry ice. "And let's not ruin it."

"Is that what we're doing? I thought I was just asking you questions. I'm not allowed to do that?"

"Fox." Ten degrees cooler, and she still has not blinked.

He looks at the table, the perfection of each traditional dish. Wants for a moment to sweep his arm across all of it, overturn the table and splash all the colors together into one glorious chaotic mess on her unmarked beige carpet.

But instead he clenches his jaw, stamping the urges all down into some deep inner recess. And starts to carve the turkey, knife slicing into flesh with savage strokes.

*

So much of his relationship with Scully has been conducted via telephone, but as he dials her mother's number he wishes with a stabbing spike of pain in his chest that she were actually there with him, or he with her. As on Sunday night, he lies back on his bed, eyes shut.

Mrs. Scully answers amid a swirl of voices and laughter in the background. "Oh, Fox," she says when he identifies himself, "how are you, dear? How's your mother?"

"We're both fine, Mrs. Scully." His fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. "Fine." He can visualize the warm light of her home, her face concerned and caring.

"I asked Dana -- I ask her every year -- if she'd invite you for dinner, but of course I wouldn't want to take you away from your mother."

"I'm sure your cooking could best both of ours together," he says, "I'm sorry to miss it."

"You know you're welcome any time, not just holidays. Hold on while I get Dana for you."

The voices gradually increase and decrease in volume -- the Doppler effect of Mrs. Scully on a cordless -- and a woman's throaty laugh breaks over them. For a split-second he wonders -- but as it gets softer he realizes with a sigh that no, it isn't Scully.

He counts the seconds until he hears the phone changing hands, and then Mrs. Scully saying, "Dana, it's Fox."

And then she is there, her voice just as he knows deep in the spine of memory. "Why haven't you called me?"

"Because...nothing's really happened yet."

"Mulder!" Her exasperation comes out in a drawn-out sigh, and she stops to take a breath. "Will you tell me what it is you _want_ to happen?"

"Did you have a good Thanksgiving?"

"Don't change the subject."

"I don't know about you, but I've had better. Better being defined as indigestion _after_ the meal rather than before."

"So something did happen?"

He sighs. "I'm not sure. I just...."

"What?" she prods gently, and the sound of the background voices recedes into silence, and he knows she has moved into some space in the house by herself.

"Scully, I just had all these questions ready to ask, even before I got here. But all I've been doing is either avoiding her or not saying much of anything at all."

"What kind of questions?"

He hesitates, then plunges ahead. "Questions about whether my father...was really my father."

"You mean...?"

"I mean, biologically."

She breathes in. "Oh, Mulder." Sighs. "This time I really had no idea."

And oh, such a relief, to finally tell her. "You were there when I first tried to ask her. When we drove up to Greenwich together that weekend I saw Dr. Goldstein and Amy and David Cassandra."

He can sense her remembering. "So you're avoiding her because you're afraid of another confrontation?"

"You of all people should know confrontation is the _last_ thing I'm afraid of."

Her silence is not reproachful, but he sighs again at his quip. He can picture her on the insides of his eyelids, head tilted up at him in all seriousness.

"It's not that. But something's different this time. I've actually been thinking this might be the last time I come here pursuing this particular truth."

"Because you don't want to try anymore, or because you think there won't be any need to?"

"Because...I think there won't be any need to."

"You think she'll tell you what you want to know?"

"No, that's not it either. I just have a feeling...whether I learn the truth or not, this'll be the last time."

"What will you do, Mulder?" Her voice is so soft, a cushion to fall into, a warm landing place to keep him safe. "If you don't find out?"

He opens his eyes, only the blank white ceiling meeting his gaze. "I don't know, Scully. I really don't."

*

On Friday night, his mother makes reservations at a five star Italian restaurant in town, and he dons his Thanksgiving Day suit again. This time she dresses in basic black, jewelry conspicuously absent. He makes no mention of it as he holds her coat open for her, and watches in silence as she crosses the front door threshold with cane in hand.

She walks down the driveway to his car with a pace only somewhat hampered by the piece of wood, and he moves just a half step behind, a guiding hand at her elbow. She makes it to the passenger's side without mishap, and he stores her cane in the backseat as she buckles herself into the car.

At a stoplight, he glances over at his mother, her profile shadowed in the dimness of the car's interior. She glances back at him, touches his hand on the steering wheel with her own, then drops it back into her lap.

She has never been cold to him in the matter of touch, even when hidden in her own grief, her own secrets. She has always given him embraces, sometimes small touches as if to reassure herself he is still there. Perhaps because of recent years' events, and perhaps because of Samantha as well, she recognizes the impossible guarantee of a child's safety, of knowing all whereabouts at all times.

He knows she must think of Samantha and his father everyday, as he does. Dead or disappeared loved ones -- even divorced -- do not necessarily disappear from memory. He might be writing an expense report, or folding laundry, or checking his email, and he will remember. The sense of them, of their existence in his past, surfacing. They never sink very deep.

He and his mother are the lone survivors, lone even with each other. They have only spoken of his sister and his father in anger, when he has tried to pull the truth from her.

Known paternity is a foundation taken for granted by so many. He has asked himself for years, and not just in relation to this issue, where is the line between keeping a secret from a child and telling him the truth?

He has never recognized the necessity of such a demarcation. But those lines bind his mother's life, hemming her in. Capturing her in a spider's web. He wonders if she is truly ignorant of the web's existence, or if it is her own unwillingness to break out even now. He wonders also if it is his own unwillingness to believe the truth is anything but what he darkly suspects.

*

The restaurant has valet service, and he walks his mother in from the sidewalk with a hand at her back. Their table has an ideal setup on a dais with a large window, and he can both look out of it and observe the rest of the diners from his seat.

"I only come here on special occasions," his mother says over the menu. "When I want to indulge myself or treat someone else."

"My leaving is a special occasion?"

She looks surprised. "Why no, not at all, Fox. We're celebrating the good week we've had together."

His nod of agreement is slow in coming. Yes, it has been a good week, because he has been neither struck nor wept at. But the outright denial of her statement is a blow, even after experience with years of the same.

"What would you like for an appetizer, Fox? I know the soup is always marvelous."

"Better than my partner's recipe?" he says lightly, and she beams.

They give their orders to the polite, tuxedo-clad waiter, who asks if they would like some wine.

His mother answers with a quick, "No, thank you," before he can ask what they may choose from, and he remembers then what a teetotaler she has been since his father passed away. He watches her face as they sip at their waters, the composed blankness of her features.

Knows an irresistible urge to shatter her false calm.

"When was the last time you had a drink, anyway, Mom?" he asks.

She blinks and sets down her glass. "Hmm?"

"The last time you had a drink. Of alcohol."

"Fox, what are you talking about?"

He pushes ahead, blood rising in that familiar frustration. "Correct me if I'm wrong," he says, "but you never used to shy away from a glass of wine at dinner. Or a beer at the summer house. Or a shot of rum as a tranquilizer."

Her mouth tightens. "Stop it. Right now. I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I don't like it."

He cannot stop, though. "You and dad both. Drowning it all in drink for years. And now all of a sudden you're cured."

"Fox. This is extremely disrespectful. Both of your father's memory and of me."

"You don't think it's disrespectful of my father's memory to be taking up with that cigarette smoking bastard?"

She goes white, he can see it happen in front of him, white as the walls of her house. "I thought we had settled that subject."

"No, Mom. _You_ settled it. By denying everything."

"I denied baseless accusations!" she hisses.

"Not so baseless now, apparently, after what happened to me in the hospital."

She stills. "What...happened to you?"

And now he stands at the edge of a precipice. Some cliff of stone with a jagged outcropping, and the next step will be his last, will be the prelude to a freefall. "I learned something." His voice is low and raw. "And it may or may not be true. That's for you to tell me, maybe admit that you've lied to me all these years. It's about my father."

"Fox --"

He continues, ruthless. "I learned that he wasn't really my father after all. That my father is the smoking man. That you checked me out of the hospital and _gave_ me to that son of a bitch. And then he almost killed me."

"That's not true!" At her outburst the conversation from the surrounding tables stills, and she glances around.

"Which part?"

She puts up a hand. "Fox, you don't understand."

He lunges forward in his seat, almost knocking his glass over, speaking into her face. "Help me to understand, Mom. Help me understand what's been kept from me for too long."

She shakes her head. Dry-eyed, but her mouth is trembling. "He saved you, Fox. Those doctors, they didn't know anything about what was going on. He saved you, just like he saved me."

He draws back, a slow recoil. "What?"

"After my stroke. I woke up in the hospital, and he was there. He saved my life. He saved yours, too. You were dying, but look at you now, Fox. You're with me, we're eating together, we're...."

Stunned, he watches her press a hand to her mouth, but still she does not cry. "Mom," he murmurs. "None of this would have happened in the first place if I wasn't... _his._ "

She puts her hand on the table, pale fingers splayed, and whispers with downcast eyes, "If you'd been born Bill's child, you would have been taken, instead of your sister."

He swallows. "Is that why.... Someone -- a man -- told me that Samantha was taken to be a genetic hybrid. That Dad wanted _me_ to uncover...." He swallows again. "Did Dad know about you and...?" Stops, because he cannot speak anymore.

"Yes," she whispers. "Bill knew you were not his own child. So Samantha was the one."

It is as if her face is changing right there before him, watching her finally say the words. He remembers when it was smooth and unwrinkled, her hair a rich brown over the natural blush of her skin. And now she is white, old and white. He can feel himself pulling away from her with each truth she reveals.

"How long?" he rasps. "How long did it go on?"

"Years. I ended it when you were still very small, because he married."

He watches her hand on the table with a sick fascination. He married. Cassandra Spender.

"I can't explain why I kept this from you," she continues. "I only wanted to keep you safe. Shield you from pain and danger." She looks up at him, her eyes a pool of night.

His breath catches. "That's what _he_ told me." Whispering also, his voice hoarse through tears she will not shed herself.

*

They enter the house in silence, stomachs empty. His flight up the stairs does not pause even for the hesitant hand she places on his arm.

That night he lies on the old bed in his room, unsleeping. He knows his mother is just down the hall, most likely also awake. He wonders what she is thinking. If she sleeps easier at night than he does.

The phone on the nightstand awaits him, promising Scully's voice in the time it takes to dial, but he does not move to use it.

He lies still, staring at the white ceiling.

*

Leavetaking has become a custom with them. His clothes are packed before she can finish making breakfast. English muffins, oatmeal, coffee. They eat at the kitchen table in silence, and he notices she has moved the poinsettia from the dining room to the window over the sink.

When they finish he rinses the dishes and coffee mugs, hands gentle on the bone china, watching the empty branches in the yard. They move in the wind like long, spindly fingers.

She breaks the quiet as he turns from the sink. "Do you have everything, Fox?"

He nods. "I double-checked. Nothing left behind."

She lets out a breath. "Well. I'll walk you to the door."

His luggage and laptop sit against the wall next to her cane. He shoulders as much as he can, draping the garment bag with his Thanksgiving suit over his arm, and turns around to say a goodbye.

She surprises him, stepping close and reaching up to embrace him. After a moment he encircles her shoulders with his free arm. She is shorter, and he is careful not to lean too heavily out of regard for her arthritis. The scent of lavender is frail and cool, replaced too easily when he opens the door by the brisk autumn air.

"Drive carefully," she says. And in her eyes there is the unspoken worry. The acknowledgement of truth revealed, its potential consequences.

"I'll call you when I get home," he says.

There are dead leaves on the porch steps, blown in from the wind. His feet crunch them to bits as he descends to the front walk. He gets into his car, not looking back although she waits on the porch in her dark coat.

On the I-95, southbound, he speed-dials Scully's number.

"Hello?" Her voice blurry from sleep.

"I'm on my way home," he says.

"Mulder," she murmurs, setting delicious chills to his spine. "My place or yours? I'll meet you." There is a question in her tone, _Or do you want to be alone?_

He hesitates for less than a second. "Your place."

Her relief is palpable even through the cell phone. "Okay. I'll see you then."

"Scully, I...." He trails off.

"Yes?"

He sighs. "Nothing. I'll tell you about it when I get there."


End file.
